File this one under more-serious-less-fun articles. It's kind of depressing, but it's something that I'm passionate about and feel needs to be discussed.
If you haven't read about it already, the New York Times wrote a pretty good summary of what's going on in the NCAA. And there's more about it here. But let me just give you the TL;DR version: the athletic departments of the Big 5 conferences (Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC, and ACC) now have the authority to essentially play by their own rules - they can pay athletes a living stipend, increase the value of their scholarships, give out health insurance, let players contact agents, etc. From the second article, it also gives athletes the rights to royalties that the NCAA was making off of their likenesses (mostly from video games).
Sounds great, right? More power to the athletes, let them get paid, stick it to the man!
And it is great...if you play football or basketball, and if you play one of those sports in one of the Big 5 conferences. If you don't (which is overwhelming majority of college athletes), well...bummer, dude.
So why's this personal to me? Because I was a college athlete. I ran cross country and track at Xavier, a smaller-tier (don't say mid-major!) D1 school. And I was lucky, too -- Xavier's athletic department bucked the trend by adding men's indoor and outdoor track as a varsity sport a little over a decade ago. That's the exception to the rule, which has seen many D1 schools cutting men's track and cross country programs. While I was in college, crosstown rival Cincinnati removed all scholarships for men's track and cross country (and a couple other 'marginal' sports, too) at the same time it was building new facilities for the football team. Because, you know, priorities.
Which brings me to my main point: what is good for football and basketball programs is bad for every other sport. Listen, I'm not naive enough to think that we can all exist in harmony regardless of money. I know that, at Xavier, the men's basketball team essentially funded the rest of the athletic department. The problem is that, in search of revenues, athletic departments are increasingly concentrating resources among football and basketball at the expense of every other sport. The new developments only serve to exacerbate the trend.
With new rules that allow athletic departments to throw more money at big-time football and basketball -- because paying athletes, adding scholarship value, and offering health care all cost money -- those schools will throw more money at those sports. To spend more, these schools can do one of two things: bring in more revenue or cut costs. Because most already don't bring in enough revenue, the only option is to cut costs. 'Marginal' teams are the sports that are cut, and men's track & cross country are typically the first to go (along with swimming, wrestling, and other Olympic sports). They can't cut women's sports, because, you know, like Title IX or something.
(Seriously. When athletic departments cut men's sports, their first rationale is usually Title IX. Yup. A law from 1972 requiring gender equality is the reason schools cut sports...40 years after the fact. I feel bad that women are being blamed! We should all be smart enough to realize that it's not about gender equality, but about money.)
Among D1 schools, it's the moderate-sized schools that have the most to lose. They don't get as much national success as the Big 5 conferences, thus they don't get as much national exposure, and thus they don't make as much money. So they pump more into football and basketball programs, to try and get on the same level as the bigger schools...without nearly the budget of those schools. Sports like men's track and xc are simply dropped like flotsam. There are too many cases to name: Temple, Delaware, Central Florida, Ohio, Bowling Green, and the list goes on. Even Maryland, a school in a Big 5 conference and in the pocket of UnderArmour, recently cut their men's running program.
So it looks like it's official: college athletics really is all about the money. It's not about teaching life skills through sport. It's not about forming well-rounded individuals. It's not about augmenting the academic mission of the university through athletic pursuits. It's about wringing as much money and exposure as possible out of a select few teams, everyone else be damned.
The NCAA website even states that "student-athlete success on the field, in the classroom, and in life is at the heart of our mission." Most of us student-athletes (or former ones), the ones who aren't on TV or in the paper or on SportsCenter, actually believe that, too. It seems that, judging by their actions, the NCAA doesn't, though.
However, is there a silver lining in the demise of college sports? It may be time for the flourishing of D2 and D3 athletic programs -- without the lure of big scholarships, where schools have a much more limited budget, to be sure, but they also tie their sports much closer to the educational purpose of college. And the irony of having a more limited budget is that it allows the school to spread the money around to many programs, instead of concentrating it in a select few.
Or maybe it's time (and we're seeing signs of this in the new NCAA rules allowances) for big-time football and basketball to become entirely separate entities from the rest of the athletic department. They can have all the money they want, but there's still a budget left for the other sports.
Whether for good or for bad, the world of college sports is rapidly changing...it's just unfortunate that men's track and cross country is caught in the crossfire.
If you haven't read about it already, the New York Times wrote a pretty good summary of what's going on in the NCAA. And there's more about it here. But let me just give you the TL;DR version: the athletic departments of the Big 5 conferences (Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC, and ACC) now have the authority to essentially play by their own rules - they can pay athletes a living stipend, increase the value of their scholarships, give out health insurance, let players contact agents, etc. From the second article, it also gives athletes the rights to royalties that the NCAA was making off of their likenesses (mostly from video games).
Sounds great, right? More power to the athletes, let them get paid, stick it to the man!
And it is great...if you play football or basketball, and if you play one of those sports in one of the Big 5 conferences. If you don't (which is overwhelming majority of college athletes), well...bummer, dude.
So why's this personal to me? Because I was a college athlete. I ran cross country and track at Xavier, a smaller-tier (don't say mid-major!) D1 school. And I was lucky, too -- Xavier's athletic department bucked the trend by adding men's indoor and outdoor track as a varsity sport a little over a decade ago. That's the exception to the rule, which has seen many D1 schools cutting men's track and cross country programs. While I was in college, crosstown rival Cincinnati removed all scholarships for men's track and cross country (and a couple other 'marginal' sports, too) at the same time it was building new facilities for the football team. Because, you know, priorities.
Which brings me to my main point: what is good for football and basketball programs is bad for every other sport. Listen, I'm not naive enough to think that we can all exist in harmony regardless of money. I know that, at Xavier, the men's basketball team essentially funded the rest of the athletic department. The problem is that, in search of revenues, athletic departments are increasingly concentrating resources among football and basketball at the expense of every other sport. The new developments only serve to exacerbate the trend.
With new rules that allow athletic departments to throw more money at big-time football and basketball -- because paying athletes, adding scholarship value, and offering health care all cost money -- those schools will throw more money at those sports. To spend more, these schools can do one of two things: bring in more revenue or cut costs. Because most already don't bring in enough revenue, the only option is to cut costs. 'Marginal' teams are the sports that are cut, and men's track & cross country are typically the first to go (along with swimming, wrestling, and other Olympic sports). They can't cut women's sports, because, you know, like Title IX or something.
(Seriously. When athletic departments cut men's sports, their first rationale is usually Title IX. Yup. A law from 1972 requiring gender equality is the reason schools cut sports...40 years after the fact. I feel bad that women are being blamed! We should all be smart enough to realize that it's not about gender equality, but about money.)
Among D1 schools, it's the moderate-sized schools that have the most to lose. They don't get as much national success as the Big 5 conferences, thus they don't get as much national exposure, and thus they don't make as much money. So they pump more into football and basketball programs, to try and get on the same level as the bigger schools...without nearly the budget of those schools. Sports like men's track and xc are simply dropped like flotsam. There are too many cases to name: Temple, Delaware, Central Florida, Ohio, Bowling Green, and the list goes on. Even Maryland, a school in a Big 5 conference and in the pocket of UnderArmour, recently cut their men's running program.
So it looks like it's official: college athletics really is all about the money. It's not about teaching life skills through sport. It's not about forming well-rounded individuals. It's not about augmenting the academic mission of the university through athletic pursuits. It's about wringing as much money and exposure as possible out of a select few teams, everyone else be damned.
The NCAA website even states that "student-athlete success on the field, in the classroom, and in life is at the heart of our mission." Most of us student-athletes (or former ones), the ones who aren't on TV or in the paper or on SportsCenter, actually believe that, too. It seems that, judging by their actions, the NCAA doesn't, though.
However, is there a silver lining in the demise of college sports? It may be time for the flourishing of D2 and D3 athletic programs -- without the lure of big scholarships, where schools have a much more limited budget, to be sure, but they also tie their sports much closer to the educational purpose of college. And the irony of having a more limited budget is that it allows the school to spread the money around to many programs, instead of concentrating it in a select few.
Or maybe it's time (and we're seeing signs of this in the new NCAA rules allowances) for big-time football and basketball to become entirely separate entities from the rest of the athletic department. They can have all the money they want, but there's still a budget left for the other sports.
Whether for good or for bad, the world of college sports is rapidly changing...it's just unfortunate that men's track and cross country is caught in the crossfire.
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